Use a Mac? For actual work? Evernote Business has arrived

Cloud-based notepad Evernote has gone professional: it now boasts an office package with shared notebooks and smart searching for only twice the cost of a Google Docs account.

Evernote Business is priced at $10 a month per employee for which staff get access to Business Notebooks that sit alongside their existing Evernote scratchpads, but can be viewed and edited by everyone else in the company. There's lots of searching too, with pertinent documents popping up while the user is trying to take notes, as the company's launch video demonstrates:

Evernote promises easy configuration and human support on the phone; there's a management interface allowing users to share notes with specific people or publish them company wide in a Business Library; and sharing is also possible with people outside the business as long as they've got an Evernote identity.

Premium users of Evernote are already paying $5 (£4) a month for the privilege of editing their notes offline, which is essential if one is making heavy use of the mobile apps and suffers from spotty connectivity. However, these clients don't yet support the creation of Business Notebooks nor can they access the Business Library as that functionality is, for the moment, restricted to Mac and web clients. So anyone using Windows or going mobile may want to hold off for upcoming broader support. ®